Archive: Books

The closing of Vertigo Books in College Park this weekend has readers talking about whether the merits of locally-owned, independent bookstores create any obligation to do business at shops that may be a bit pricier, but add value to our communities in other ways. Here's a peek at some of the better email traffic since my piece ran earlier this week: My argument that Amazon and other online booksellers have an unfair advantage because they don't charge sales tax--as well as my comment about big chain bookstores being "soulless"--drew some push-back from folks who work at those places and...

It's gotten to the point that even newspaper editors -- hopeless nostalgics that they tend to be -- roll their eyes over yet another Death of a Bookstore story. Like tales about dying newspapers, these lovesongs to a fleeting era and a sagging technology can be tiresome, both to younger folks who see the new media as a perfectly reasonable and even exciting replacement for what came before, and to older folks who have had it with the constant reminders that the culture that served them so well is vanishing before their eyes. So when Bridget Warren and Todd Stewart...